Amanda Philips

Assistant Professor, Department of Art, University of Virginia

Amanda Phillips received her doctorate in Oriental Studies and Islamic Art & Archaeology from the University of Oxford in 2011. Her first book, Everyday Luxuries (2016) was published in conjunction with National Museums of Berlin and focused on people, art and objects in early modern Ottoman Constantinople. Her second book, Sea Change, will be published by the University of California Press in 2021. It investigates Ottoman textiles over the longer period, with attention to how transfers of technology, global trade, artistic exchange, and silks, cottons, and woolens themselves shaped topographies of art, commerce, and daily life. She has recently held an NEH fellowship in Istanbul and a British Academy Visiting Fellowship in St Andrews, Scotland.

Caravan and Dhow: An Overview of the Trade in Silks and Other Textiles from South Asia to the Mediterrean, 1300-1800

The trade that brought silks, cottons, and other commodities from South Asia to the Muslim Mediterranean lasted for centuries, enduring and engendering a number of changes. Starting with fourteenth-century printed cottons made in Gujarat for the Egyptian market, moving to tied-and-dyed silks excavated at sites along the Red Sea, and finally looking at how South Asian fabrics impacted weaving practices in Ottoman Constantinople, this paper makes a survey of textiles and their reception by consumers and artisans in the eastern Mediterranean. It also takes up earlier scholarly arguments about differences in price for labor and material in Middle East and South Asia, and considers fabrics made purposefully to appeal to distant markets. Import substitution, emulation, and outright imitation are also taken into account, as is an early modern rage for fabrics in the ḫaṭāʾī, or chinoiserie, style.